I Celebrate Myself…

When Growing Happens

I read East Love Pray last year when I was coming back to New York for what I thought was a summer visit. I was in a different place emotionally, then, and for some time now, almost a year after I read it, it continued to present itself in many ways: either in thought, or as I am talking to someone my eyes land on the book at their desk. So I decided to read it again. The thing is I liked the book, but I didn’t love the book, and there were definitely parts of it that rang true for me, and there were definitely lessons that I know I learned and can learn from it. After all, the book is about woman who is trying to find herself after an emotional breakdown and she does this by doing the things I am doing now– eating good food, doing yoga, meditating and above all, learning to love herself completely. As I re-read the first section (when she was in Italy), I decided that because this is the second time around, it is more of a tutorial… and I should buy it in audio form.

This is my first book on audio book. I have owned lectures on disc, but never a book. I am totally against anything that might assist the extinction of real books: audio books, Kindle (don’t get me started on that one), but with this book I think I can excuse myself. I bought a paper version of the book, and this is the exception. It is like I am attending a book reading, or something.

I have been listening to the books since I bought it yesterday, off and on. and because I read the first section, I skipped some discs. I am on the sixth disc, and I am planning on going back to disc five, especially the part where Richard, from Texas, shows Gilbert ( the author) some tough love when she is incessantly brooding over her ex, David. I need that I think– his wisdom.

There is something to be said about someone who allows people to see the vulnerable parts of them–the parts that we often try to hide. “That’s when growing happens.”(That’s a line from Rilke’s Poem 10) When you admit that those parts of you make you who you are– human.

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I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself
A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
A Buddhist, a Jew.
The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even pure
Soul.
Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me
Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.
~ Hafiz ~